"Feeling" lines
We did a huge amount of work with backhoes in the oilfields in Kern County, California, and the soil there can range from mud to rock. Being as busting a line there could mean a water, oil, gas, or live steam spill, or perhaps shorting a 440 3/phase or more electrical setup, digging was done very, very carefully in most cases. Locating by feel with a hoe was verboten!
We used every source we could to locate buried objects and every detection tool known. The boss would hunt up old timers and drag them out to a field for a look-see. A walk-a-round was mandatory for the entire crew, and not just within a few feet of the job site, but way out in a big circle. The oil companies get real ringy when you shut down a few wells because you dug up something, they go nuts when the whole field shuts down. Some of these fields and well locations are over a hundred years old and there is stuff buried everywhere.
In spite of all our best efforts including the above and always using an observer or two and a couple of shovel men, we'd hit something that was not known to be there every once in a while. If we were lucky it was a dead line. Sometimes we weren't so lucky.
Steam lines are about the worse for the crew. Live steam takes the skin off from exposed limbs in a heartbeat, Levi's hardly slow it down, and even lines that have been properly shut down, drained, tagged out, blocked, and ribboned off, will occasionally belch a plug of boiling hot water and then a cloud of steam. That's why most of these are now run on the surface and only go underground where they absolutely have to.
Years ago I hit a gas line in a parking lot with a little Case gas-engine dozer. I couldn't figure out why the engine would race like crazy in one certain area. I did have a cold at the time and couldn't smell a thing. The foreman eventually smelled the gas and came over to see what it was. That line was about 4 inches under the surface.
Does anyone here remember the excavator that hit the high pressure gas line right on I-70 just east of Denver a few years ago. Killed several people and melted several machines and autos. And they knew it was there!!........
Plowing snow around locations, compressor stations, and collector facilities in Michigan is always exciting. The gas companies try their best to mark everything before the snow flies, but they miss some stuff, mostly dead-men, and over a winter sometimes the snow banks cover up the markers. Even a Case 580 will knock a good hole in a pipe or rip wiring off. I used a Michigan 280 rubber-tired dozer most of that winter, and my boss cringed every time I went out of the yard for the day. But boy that baby could move snow!
His brother took out a 2" feeder line coming down from an oil well up on a hill with a 644 Deere loader. It was buried under a snow bank. He hit it right where it joined another line and next thing you know he hollered at me to shut the pump-jack off cause I was right at the wellhead clearing off the location. The break was about a mile downhill from the well, and about two miles from the other. You just can't believe how much crude oil will drain out of those 2" pipes. Fortunately for the bosses brother, these wells were not in the hydrogen sulfide (poison gas) zone. The cleanup cost was huge and involved several companies, it took a week to do, and both wells were shut in and out of production.
I hit a fat communication cable in Arvada, Colorado that connected the missile silos in Wyoming with NORAD in Colorado Springs in 1971. The cable originally was buried 14 feet down from the surface, but the developer that bought the property came in with scrapers and removed all but 2-3 feet of that overburden. The cable was not marked on any plans nor did any city inspectors know about it at the time. The extreme right rear basement corner was staked for a 4 foot cut, and that's about right where I hit the cable. It got pretty exciting there in about an hour or so. Cops, FBI, military folks of all kinds. My boss and I thought we might wind up in prison for a long time……
Myself included, and most other backhoe operators I know, could not feel anything with a backhoe bucket smaller than a 12 inch steel pipe without breaking it. There are exceptions I suppose and of course, other indicators that something's there, but the usual indication is generally hung up in the air on a bucket tooth.
It's not worth the risk or cost to knowingly try to find buried things with a backhoe or excavator, or any other tool other than a small shovel, unless you know for absolute certain they are no good or not being used. That's an assumption, and most here know where that word is in the dictionary.
